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German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

the-decoder.com

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Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#211

Post by dabinat »

heathrow83829 wrote: post #63
Swizec wrote: post #18

Good. The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. Same as it works with employees. Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger. But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.

at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth. what if there's a 1/1000 chance of some error, then the company could be sued millions of times per day. down vote all you want, but I firmly believe this is an example where the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills. google would be rig…

I don’t know if critical thinking comes into it. If Google tells me “Company X is a terrible company that cheats its customers”, I don’t automatically know that’s false. It could very well be true. If I’ve got to look at the rest of the search results to figure that out anyway, what’s the point of the AI summary?

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#212

Post by bmacho »

themafia wrote: post #125
Swizec wrote: post #18

Good. The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. Same as it works with employees. Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger. But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.

> But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results. Time to set my VPN location to Germany. I'm tired of the "udm" trick.

How is it tiring to set up

https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s

in your address bar once?

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#213

Post by kiviuq »

scottyah wrote: post #149
Swizec wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof. Correct, most jurisdictions do not allow businesses which cannot be held liable for their actions. This is pretty core to a modern society. Imagine if a company selling Knicks tickets was not expected to then actually provide said tickets and there was simply nothing you could do about it. Oopsies our sales page is f…

Almost all jurisdictions allow businesses which cannot be held liable for all their actions. Imagine losing you house because someone decided to smother themselves in your infused cooking oil and light themselves on fire. Businesses are made to make it easier to share profits and responsibilities when trying to fulfill users wants. Laws are made to offer protections for consumers (because nobody has time for common s…

I see an economic and social problem:

Freedom as in freedom of private property can only be guaranteed by the State. The State watches over its own population and makes sure that private property, i.e. capital and work, is made productive, so people go to work, businesses make profits, and everybody pays taxes. Taxes are the State's prime source of income.

When all these million of private interests collide, which they are bound to do, the State provides a jurisdictional system that has to decide between those private interests and the State's own interests.

E.g.: If a business owner refuses access to medical patents or to lower prices and safe potentially people's lives, the State has to decide between that immediate interest and its own interests, which is protecting private capital, as its source of income. Since I'm in Germany: In the emission scandal Volkswagen didn't just physically harm people, VW violated the private property of millions of customers. Despite that, the German State sided with Volkswagen the larger capital and did nothing. During Corona, the German State refused to open patents for a limited time to help safe people's lives in poor countries. Doing so would've violated the interest of private capital, so it refused. In contrast, if I as an individual refuse to help somebody in an emergency, the State would either fine me or put me in jail. In this case, people's lives become the State's prime interests, because they are also the State's source of income, as a productive workforce.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#214

Post by intended »

8note wrote: post #117
thfuran wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re seriously arguing that Google’s libel shouldn’t count as libel because they showed it to too many people? It’s absolutely insane to suggest that a company should be immune from liability for its actions if it operates on such scale that those actions harm millions of people every day on the basis that dealing with that many lawsuits would be too inconvenient.

its not inaccurate though. consider Purdue pharma - the Sacklers got off with all their wealth intact because they were too big to sue and properly collect money for their victims.

Just because someone got away with it means everyone should get away with it ?

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#215

Post by intended »

SllX wrote: post #180
Gigachad wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If google didn't intend it's answers to be taken at face value it would just present the citations in a list of links rather than generating an answer. Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.

The AI summary is still useful for narrowing down the results, even if you fully check the citations. > Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources. To lazy people yes. That would be a marketing point. It’s not that though, so you use it to save time, but you don’t get to skip the verification step.

Absolutely not.

LLMs are, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of outsourced workers.

Google created a summary, not just sharing search results.

Google is responsible for the output it created and then published.

If they had only surfaced search results, then they would not be liable for what other people generated.

Google’s scale does not protect it from this liability.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#216

Post by intended »

necovek wrote: post #74
gmerc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So scale of harm creates immunity, is that the argument ?

Did we not already see that with the financial sector in 2008?

Sort of ?

Either way, we do not want a repeat of that.

Plus too big to fail as a US malaise, that then toppled the rest of the economy.

The EU is taking steps to prevent that, so this is laudable.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#217

Post by drawfloat »

8note wrote: post #117
thfuran wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re seriously arguing that Google’s libel shouldn’t count as libel because they showed it to too many people? It’s absolutely insane to suggest that a company should be immune from liability for its actions if it operates on such scale that those actions harm millions of people every day on the basis that dealing with that many lawsuits would be too inconvenient.

its not inaccurate though. consider Purdue pharma - the Sacklers got off with all their wealth intact because they were too big to sue and properly collect money for their victims.

No they got away with it through a combination of lax pharmaceutical laws, and because they were rich and connected to the officials who should have investigated them.

They're also almost universally regarded as having committed evil acts at this point, so who cares why they got away with it?

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#218

Post by ozgrakkurt »

andrewmutz wrote: post #101
Swizec wrote: post #18

Good. The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. Same as it works with employees. Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger. But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.

I think it's a completely reasonable position that companies making self-driving cars and question/answer systems are legally liable for any errors. But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the la…

> AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits.

This doesn’t sound convincing. What AI and what company?

LLMs don’t seem like they will ever be reliable like that.

Self driving like waymo might be?

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#219

Post by kiicia »

andrewmutz wrote: post #101
Swizec wrote: post #18

Good. The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. Same as it works with employees. Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger. But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.

I think it's a completely reasonable position that companies making self-driving cars and question/answer systems are legally liable for any errors. But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the la…

why offer expensive service when it's effectively useless and only add to cost and amount of work? what else they offer, "summarize my text" and "generate custom emoji"? I can live without that...

for now only volvo accepts liability, and only for "slow crawl mode"

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#220

Post by Hfuffzehn »

If I get it correctly I like the ruling.

So Google has established a product called Search. For that product rules have been established. Google has monopolized that product.

Now Google is replacing that product with a new product. But they keep calling it the same thing. Because they want to keep their monopoly.

That is what has been deemed illegal. Gemini is not illegal. Pretending the worst version of Gemini is Search is illegal, because it breaks the rules established for Search.

But IANAL.

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